No Opening Date, But Some Room Details For Shangri-La at the Shard

We can’t tell you much that you don’t already know when it comes to Shangri-La at the Shard; we’ve documented its long and winding road to opening ad infinitum on this site. In fact, it’s nearly three and a half years ago we took our first pictures of the then under construction tallest building in Europe.

And no, unfortunately we still have no more specific window for opening than “first quarter of 2014”. But! The hotel has an updated, and slightly expanded, website, with details on room types, their views, and what looks like some actual photography from inside the hotel. While we pour over these snippets, we’ll go ahead and take it as confirmation – for now – that Shangri-La is indeed committed to making it across the finish line with its second western European hotel.

The hotel will have 185 rooms split across four categories: Superior, Deluxe, Premier, and Grand Premier. Superior Rooms face south, while Deluxe and Premier have the more desirable northern view, towards the City and St. Paul’s Cathedral. Grand Premier rooms add a 180-degree aspect to that, an example of which is shown in the top half of the opening picture above.

Entry-level Superior Suites offer the same southerly views as the equivalent room type. We’re not sure we’d ever choose the additional space they provide over the views of a Grand Premier room, assuming a suite would be more expensive. A similar pairing view-wise looks to be the case for Deluxe Rooms and Deluxe Suites.

Top-end suites include “Suite on 37” and “Suite on 38”. Given that the hotel runs from floors 34 to 52, we would have expected these to be higher , but perhaps with the building becoming slimmer further up these floors offered more space.

Lastly, there is the Shangri-La Suite (above), which clocks in at 2,000-2,500 square feet. No floor level is indicated at this point. All suites come with personal butler service.

The health club on floor 52 will include this pool, which does look rather good. On the same floor will be bar GŎNG, with main restaurant and lounge TĪNG (from the Chinese word for living room) on floor 35. All the way down on the ground floor will be deli LÁNG (‘pathway’).

We will be counting the days until we get to take in the view ourselves, and the second we do, you will read about it here. Speaking of European Shangri-La hotels, we came across the mention of an additional hotel in Rome on the group's website, opening in 2017. We’ll tell you more about that when we can too.